Wednesday, February 15, 2012

R2P and the new colonialism

In Foreign Policy, David Rieff points to the religious zeal of proponents of R2P ('responsibility to protect') currently ramping up the drumbeats for military intervention in Syria.

Welcome
to the "End of History," human-rights style. Like Francis Fukuyama's famous
argument, there is simply no basis other than our hopes and our preferences to
make us think that though the road toward this radiant future, to use the old
Soviet expression, will be neither straight nor smooth, nevertheless it only
goes one way, and that is in the direction of progress, peace, justice, and
rights.
It
is this religious quality to the support for R2P that helps account for
the odd reaction among those who believe that something must be done to
stop the Assad regime's war against much of its own people despite the
Russian
and Chinese vetoes. Obviously, some of this is purely political
posturing.
But it is not only spin. The moral outrage, however misplaced, is real
enough.
In her contribution tothe New Republic
symposium, Suzanne Nossel -- formerly Richard Holbrooke's deputy when he was
the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, founder of
DemocracyArsenal.org,
former chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch, and now
executive director of the U.S. branch of Amnesty International --
illustrated
this faith-based ethical triumphalism perfectly when she insisted that
though the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the Security Council resolution
had been "a
sharp political defeat," it had also represented a "potent moral
victory" and a "tectonic shift" in the advancement of a global human
rights regime whose
victory is now inevitable, no matter what kind of sovereigntist
rear-guard
actions the Russians and Chinese may continue to mount.
The
implication is clear. Three years after the adoption of R2P by the U.N. General
Assembly and more than a year after the beginning of the Arab Spring, not only
is the Assad regime on the wrong side of history, but the Russians and Chinese
are as well. In her New Republic
piece, Nossel even goes so far as to imply that the Russians and the Chinese
know this themselves. They cast their votes out of fear of this human
rights-based future, she writes, claiming that the "bell of international
condemnation and isolation tolling now for Damascus sounds an uneasy note in
Beijing and Moscow." Even by the hubristic standards of the human rights
movement, these are extraordinary claims. One doubts, however, that they will
cause either Vladimir Putin or Hu Jintao to quake in his boots as this owl of Minerva
flies by, presumably with a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
held in its beak.

I've been reading several critiques of 'human rights' ideology recently, critiques aimed at its impoverished philosophical basis or at their utility in justifying humanitarian interventions with disastrous results. As an ideology, the theory of human rights is either very thin, too thin to support the moral judgments we make about how human beings ought or ought not to be treated, or too unsupported unless anchored to a theological framework. Bentham famously wrote that rights talk was "nonsense on stilts'. By that he meant that when you dig into what is meant when people affirm rights, you find out that there isn't enough 'there' there. These days, when people affirm rights strong enough to justify military intervention for their protection, there might be too much 'there' there, but what is there is unable to be protected, and might ultimately be harmed, by military intervention by foreign powers, judging from the record of the last decades.

My suspicions of R2P, laid out in an earlier post, have only deepened since I started thinking about it. People being 'protected' by bombs and automatic weapons wielded by foreign troops tend to die more than flourish. True, the impetus is to protect ordinary folks from their local armies and militias now being used to terrorize and control them. But adding more armies to the mix hasn't tended to ramp down the violence and atrocities, except when they were already on a downward trend.

R2P seems like internationalized colonialism, supported by the same kind of religious missionary zeal the as its 19th century antecedents, (I don't have to quote Kipling here, do I?) and unlikely to secure for those whose rights are being 'protected' net benefits. I hope it doesn't lead to military intervention in Syria, though I fear it might.